False rape claims have "silver lining," according to local newspaper (via Community of the Wrongly Accused)

via Community of the Wrongly Accused

"Last Sunday morning at Union College in New York, an official emails alerted students about an atrocity that never happened. It stated that a female freshman had been sexually assaulted by three "males" (one of whom might have been approximately 16-years-old) at 1:41 a.m. The alleged victim refused any medical treatment, and did not seem traumatized. Police investigated for two days until finally the alleged victim retracted her statement and left the school. A video camera reportedly had captured the young woman on her phone at the time she said the assault occurred. After she ended the phone call, she jumped into a clump of bushes, and stayed there until her friends arrived and pulled her out, the sources said."

[Note 1/11/2014 - COTWA, for whatever reason, has taken their article down since my posting, so I have changed the below link to SAVE Services, which reprinted the COTWA article on their site.]

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Survivors Manchester excluded from Rape Support Fund (via Toy Soldiers)

via Toy Soldiers

"One of the main barriers male survivors of sexual violence face is a lack of services. Most existing sexual violence services only assist women and girls. Of the services that do assist men and boys, most provide limited counseling and referrals.

"Male survivors need services,  however, even when those organizations are created, they face dismissal by the existing female-only groups...."

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Finding common ground

Just wanted to take time and space to thank @Lancestrian for taking the time over the last five or six days to have a dialogue over Twitter, of all media, about the gendering of rape. Earlier today she posted:

@ConversiveBlog 1) I am coming around to your view on this. It's not possible to accurately determine what proportion of the population are
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 2) perpetrators based on victimhood stats (my revelation of last night) and no research has been done into how many perps
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 3) are female and how many are male. We can't even infer that women don't sexually assault other women because a woman might
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 4) not recognise another women's unwanted contact as being sexually-motivated (man stroking my hair is assumed to be sexual,
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 5) woman stroking my hair isn't). So in the absence of clear evidence like a Lisak and Miller type of study, we simply don't
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 6) know what proportion of women perpetrate sexual assaults and it's unfair to presume that more men are perps than women
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 7) without evidence. Also on reflection, I realise that framing sexual violence as something men do to (usually) women harms
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 8) the feminist goal of eliminating all sexual violence, by encouraging misogynists to see it as a "women's problem" and
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

@ConversiveBlog 9) hence ignorable. I would welcome research into the prevalence of female perpetration.
— #childfree #atheist (@Lancestrian) October 3, 2013

Baby steps. But still felt good to find common ground.